LD4 2025 - ARK persistent identifiers

ARK persistent identifiers: affordable long-term citation and access to cultural heritage -- The average URL breaks in 100 days, which is a minor disaster for people who care about durable access to teaching and learning resources. This tutorial introduces ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifiers (PIDs). As non-paywalled PIDs, ARKs mitigate against link rot. ARKs are similar to DOIs used in traditional publishing in that they both were introduced over 24 years ago, exist in large numbers, and support teaching, research, and scholarship. In contrast, ARKs are cheaper, more flexible, and less centralized, letting providers create any kind of metadata and unlimited identifiers without paying for the right to do so. ARK adoption is now accelerating in under-resourced institutions in the global South. Persistent links are especially important for protecting our investment in the linked data. Since 2001, 8.2 billion ARKs have been created by over 1600 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, and vendors.